Tuesday, October 13, 2009

SKYNET is here and it's going to kill us all. (And yes, I'm totally being authentic when I say these sorts of things. More than spiders, more than the dark, my biggest fear is the robots will come alive and kill us all. I know it paints me as a lunatic, but I take cold comfort in the knowledge that when it happens, I'll have one more vindicated, "Eff you all.")

While I agree with the summation of The Grandfather Paradox in the article, I don't think that I agree with some of the physicists' conclusions based on that idea. Yes, it's impossible to go back in time and kill your grandfather. However, that does not mean that it's possible to go back and save him. This is similar to classic fallacies such as affirming the consequent. Just because you can go back but can't kill him doesn't mean you can go back and not kill him - because that's not the way they're phrasing it! We're looking at saving someone who (perhaps) should not have been saved.

All of these vagaries, however, might be missing the point: we think of time as a line, something that's possible to jump back and forth in (or at least some of us do) but there's a lot of proof that it's not really constructed that way.

The question I think about most in my life centers around the fate versus free will and I think this weird juncture of technology, science fiction, and the promise of space-time have brought us (or at least me) to an extremely interesting point in time.

Monday, October 12, 2009

I am a crazy basketball fan. I think about basketball a lot more often than the average American and significantly less often than the bloggers whom I love to read on the subject. However, all this thinking oftentimes leaves me with conclusions that seem so obvious to me but which, for one reason or another, are left undiscussed by the afore-mentioned voices. Keeping in mind that I've been crazy wrong before, I'm going to go ahead and make some bold predictions about the start of next season, which I haven't seen made elsewhere but which seem rather obvious to me, even if they run counter to the accepted wisdom.

At the top of the list, the reason for this post, is my theory that Chris Bosh will be the biggest name free agent truly available. Chris Bosh is a monster. Casual observers of the game know his name, fans in Canada don't know what they have (and won't until he's gone, which he will be in less than a year) and SLAM just ranked him as the 13th best player in the game today. Bosh is KG-like in his utility but seems to have a better grasp on not letting his intensity make him act kind of crazy. (And that's not to knock on Garnett, by the way. That intensity is one of the biggest reasons we all fell in love with him.) Bosh has played well enough up in Canada and when I say the fans up there don't really know what they have, that's not to say that they haven't appreciated him. They're good fans, and if you tune into more than the one (two? three?) Raptors games that get national TV coverage, you can see there's a good little crowd there. However. The Raptors aren't winning. And we saw through KG's tears what losing can do to a beast. The Raptors aren't going to make that leap this year, despite some good off-season moves and Bosh seems like he's not going to be content playing much longer for a team that's not even making waves in the playoffs.

For true competitors, just making the playoffs in a league where more than half the teams do is simply not enough. You've got to make a deep run. We saw this problem with Dwyane Wade last year when he started talking about how he needed some more help in order to get back where he thinks the Heat belong. This brings us, of course, to the first wrinkle in the first proclamation...

Dwyane Wade is not really available. Wade has two options as far as I see them: he's either going to go deep in the playoffs this year, with a serviceable sidekick (and no, it's not going to be Jermaine. He'll either get someone else or a current teammate will step up) and will, therefore re-sign with the Heat or he's out of Miami. It's my opinion, though, that Wade loves Miami and would only leave for a real chance to win another ring, somewhere that he'd be comfortable and able to compete at an elite level. Let's be real: it's not gonna be LA. It's not gonna be Boston. It's not gonna be Orlando. Payroll and personality conspire to prevent those three, in what seems, to me, an obvious statement. However, that doesn't leave a lot of room if we're looking at the afore-mentioned qualifiers. Texas? All three of the teams seem like they're in win-now mode, which might look quite a bit different next summer. (I mean, only one team wins it all.) There's another possibility. Which brings me to the last point.

LeBron James ain't going nowhere. I've been calling it for more than a year, and with all this talk and thinking about it, I'm finally ready for the ridicule that this seemingly iron-clad statement will bring about my way if it turns out to be wrong. Let's just examine a few things: LeBron wants to win. He wants to be a billionaire. Those are really the only things that he's told us that we know for sure. Let's deal with first things first...the money. He's not going to make more money in New York than he does in Cleveland. That just doesn't make any sense. Not in the new, flat world we live in. He's touring China, he's selling jerseys worldwide (number three last year, number two this year?), he's got contracts with Nike and Vitamin Water, I mean, the list literally goes on and on! He doesn't need to be on the coast to have any more exposure and he doesn't need to be there to make any more money. Secondly, the winning. Simply put, there is no team in the Eastern Conference more designed to win than the Cavs right now. The Celtics will fight them. Hard. Who's the say who will win. It depends on health. But, the Cavs have been to the Finals an equal number of times in the last five years as have the Magic, the Celtics, the Heat, and the Pistons. I'm not ready to say that there's any place more well-equipped than Cleveland to win in the future as well as right now. So why would he leave? There's no more money to be had, there's no chance he'll be set up anywhere else to win more effectively.

Plus, here's where it all comes together: Shaq's contract comes off Cleveland's books next summer. They're gonna have some cash, they're gonna show LeBron a lot of it, and he's gonna be happy. But you know what? Wade's only going to be tempted to leave Miami for Cleveland. (It's not that crazy!) And Bosh is certainly going to be tempted. (And that's way less crazy.) Bosh is leaving Toronto. The only question is where he's going. If he heads to Cleveland, Wade stays put in Miami. But no matter what, LeBron James remains home.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Ah, ironic quotation marks...what do you actually mean? My best friend Brando was kind enough to snap this flick for me via his camera on his mobile and send it to me. Unfortunately, I couldn't get the pic without accessing a computer thanks to AT&T. But once I did, I thanked him profusely. And now, we all get to witness the brilliance of people who are using quotation marks incorrectly.

Thursday, October 1, 2009

I've never used a Twitter client before, so when I saw a notice about Brizzly, I went to sign up for an invitation right away. I was surprised, of course, to get one back so quickly, but now that I've been using the service for a few days, I can definitely see the appeal.

(I've heard tons about TweetDeck and, to be fair, I do use Twitterrific on the phone, just for the sake of full disclosure.)

Brizzly offers some great functions, such as automatically refreshing, which is something that Twitter really should have automated. Additionally, it explains the trending topics in a way that really makes sense, especially sometimes when I look at things and think, "That person is not a celebrity...why are they being talked about?" The ability to create groups is a really great function as well, though I think, to be honest, I'll use it more to filter people out as opposed to truly 'grouping' people. Honestly, I couldn't care less about saving my searches, but the last feature that really makes sense is organizing the direct messages in the threaded message style.

You can sign up for a Brizzly account at the home page, but if you don't feel like waiting at all, hit me up and I'll send you an invite. It's a good look at what Twitter could (and should) be, and most of these features will probably eventually be adapted, but why should we have to wait?